JMW's Strange Meeting With Romeo and Juliet


Back in the late 1980s there was a new music group in Perth called EVOS. In my final year of high school, I was involved with the EVOS Youth Ensemble as their youngest composer. I had an opportunity to have one of my pieces performed on the national classical radio station ABC FM during New Music Week when EVOS put on a concert featuring young Perth composers and performers.

One of the pieces performed that night was not composed by a local but by an obscure contemporary Hungarian composer, István Márta, that the leader of EVOS had met while studying in Hungary. The piece was entitled "JMW's Strange Meeting With Romeo and Juliet".

It was a playful piece, part minimalist, part neo-classical, part fugue with awesome time signature changes and scored for piano or harpsichord and 5 unspecified instruments. A New York Times review of the piece from the same time period described it as "a light, appealingly textured Minimalist interlude."

At various times during the last 17 years, I've wondered about getting hold of the score. About six months ago, I started looking online again and couldn't find it on any of the usual sheet music sites. I did see it on one sheet music distributor's catalogue but they didn't have any online ordering so I wrote to them. They told me they could order it especially from Hungary for me.

I'd given up on receiving it when yesterday, a package arrived containing the score. Just reading it brought back a flood of memories. But then last night, I realised about 80% of it in Logic Pro, pretty much using the instrumentation I remembered from the EVOS concert: piano, clarinet, sax, bass guitar.

When I'm finished, I'll put up an MP3 of it. I might also do a more electronic realisation of it (I'm thinking harpsichord + Moog).

UPDATE (2008-02-10): Here's an MP3 of my first realisation: piano, flute, soprano sax, clarinet, bassoon, acoustic guitar, bass guitar and percussion. Enjoy!

The original post was in the category: music but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.

The original post had 1 comment I'm in the process of migrating over.